The Center will establish and operate within the Hunts Point Peninsula a comprehensive and intensive network of coordinated self-developmental activities for youth in the fragile transitional stage from childhood into adolescence. It will be based at accessible community facilities and reflect the expressed interests of boys and girls who have voiced confusion over the process of growing up amid intense poverty, drug addiction and other family and environmental pressures. The porject will incorporate individual and group therapeutic counseling and informal disucssions conducted by mental health personnel; remedial education; dramatic arts; wood crafts; recreation, athletic and cultural activities and trips beyond the environs of the neighborhood. Thus youth will be exposed to new contacts, experiences in creative learning and living and potential avenues of future academic and vocational development as well as a new sense of values and alternative life styles. Counseling will be augmented by concrete problem solving aid involving outreach and follow up to families and schools. Youth will be educated as to the multiple causes and effects of drug abuse within the context of program components. With the aid of the current Ad Hoc Youth Planning Team, 50 boys and girls aged 12 to 14 will be recruited for intensive project participation and an additional 50 reached through recreation, athletic and social evets planned by participating youth. Priority will be placed on recruiting youth from families entrapped in welfare dependency and who have sought aid from The Center, other private and public community service agencies; on youth known by their peers as street wanderers lacking parental supervision; and on those who have come to the attention of local police and school authorities because of their difficulties. During a one-week orientation period for potential project participants, mental health personnel will establish personal histories and records to be used as tools in assessing individual and project progress on an on-going basis and against which overall quantitative and qualitative evaluation will be measured.